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Joe McKendrick

Roundtable: From USS Enterprise to Enterprise, US Navy Gets Service Oriented

The US Navy is bringing all its information resources into a single enterprise portal. (That's portal, not porthole...) In conjunction with an enterprise-wide architecture, the Navy intends to have common services available across the entire organization.

"By
the end of the calendar year, our goal is to be able to expose both
enterprise services and content across the enterprise," according to Matthew Swartz, branch head of Enterprise Initiatives for the
US Navy. "What we
are building is the ability to move information between systems. Right now not only the Navy, but across the defense department, we have a large precense
of legacy applications, or applications that are currently
disconnected from our network."

Swartz's remarks were part of a roundtable discussion
at the recent SOA in Action conference, moderated by Dave Chesebrough, president of the Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI). Swartz was also joined by Dan
Risacher, staff member with the CIO's office at the Department of
Defense and Mike Darretta, JBoss solutions architect for Red Hat.

The US Navy is also taking an enterprise view of its information technology,
according to Matt Swartz. The availability of the Navy Enterprise
Portal, along with the Navy Enterprise Information System (NEIS) is
seen as a key "initial tactical step towards enabling SOA-type services
or the ability for our users in the Navy to access enterprise
services."

The various systems and portals are being integrated and
federated through an enterprise service bus, he says. "We see this as
one day potentially being an enterprise service bus for other
capabilities or enterprise SOA services across the Navy, and ultimately
connect and federate with other DoD services" he adds.

These capabilities are now delivered via two platforms -- Oracle
Fusion middleware for NEIS and Microsoft SharePoint for the portal,
Swartz elaborates. "We belive that the portal environment will allow us
to bring distributed applications together, and also enable information
sharing that not currently available to the sailor or the warfighter in
these distributed environments."

As with any service orientation effort, the Navy is not immune from the push and pull of buying versus building solutions. "Right now, our acquisition approach is very program and
platform centric," he explains. "What that creates in an environment at the platforms in some aspects not all of those solutions are
interoperable. We identify the services and provide and implement
those solutions from an enterprise perspective. But, ultimately its
going to evolve to point where things are procured at an enterprise level, and no
longer be part of platform implementations."

(Dan Risacher's observations on the role of SOA across the US Department of Defense can be found here in my previous post.)

1 Comment

I've seen some movement towards understanding SOA by the US Navy. What I can't seem to locate is the source of any push towards implementing a SOA either aboard ship, on the ground, or in the air aside from a grass roots effort. I have also seen SOA implemented within certain products like AN/TPX-42 v14 FC1 through FC3. As well as in DFS in the early 1990's. Though SOA has changed over the years people tend to forget that is has been around for quite some time. Today we tend to include orchestration in a SOA design but most publish and suscribe architectures back in the day tended to follow what we now call a SOA architecture.

Any insight as to where the SOA push is originating? Any documents regarding direction to look into SOA for the US Navy or the US Gov't as a whole?

In this blog (formerly known as "SOA in Action"), Joe McKendrick examines how BPM and related business and IT approaches can promote business transformation.

Joe McKendrick

Joe McKendrick is an author and independent analyst who tracks the impact of information technology on management and markets. Joe speaks frequently at industry events and Webcasts, authors ZDNet's SOA blog and serves as lead analyst and author of Evans Data Corp.'s highly regarded bi-annual SOA/Web Services survey. Joe writes a regular column for Database Trends & Applications, and has authored numerous research reports in partnership with Unisphere Research for a variety of user groups. In a previous life, he served as director of the Administrative Management Society (AMS), an international professional association dedicated to advancing knowledge within the IT and business management fields. View more